Integrated circuits are used today in a variety of different applications. Integrated circuits, are for instance, employed as individual electrical elements such as transistors for switching, amplifying or manipulating high frequency signals or high power signals, as sensors for detecting physical, chemical or biological influences of different sorts, and further individual electrical elements. More complex integrated circuits are also used, for instance, in the field of integrated sensors, which comprise, apart from the actual sensing elements, circuits to preprocess or to completely evaluate the acquired data from the sensing elements.
Integrated circuits are also used in the field of more advanced computer technology, for instance, as processors, memories, application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) up to whole SOC products (SOC=System on Chip) which represent a whole computer system including a processor, memory, and further peripheral circuits on a single chip. Integrated circuits are furthermore employed in graphic-related, security-related, and numerical-related applications.
The design and layout of integrated circuits is, in many cases, based on a standard cell design, in which standard cells are arranged and routed to allow a fast and flexible realization of different products and integrated circuits. In this design process, a number of partially contradicting measures and goals have to be balanced according to the application in mind. Some of the partially contradicting goals are, for example, area efficiency, costs, the complexity of the manufacturing process itself, the quality of the resulting integrated circuit, as well as other design goals, such as electrical, mechanical, or other parameters.
In many cases, an optimization of the design with respect to one parameter leads to another parameter being changed to the contrary. Hence, the design process of integrated circuits in general may sometimes profit from a greater flexibility, compared to the result of a design and manufacturing process with a more limited flexibility.